{"id":1385,"date":"2017-05-26T17:44:22","date_gmt":"2017-05-26T17:44:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/?post_type=product&#038;p=1385"},"modified":"2025-02-26T23:44:19","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T23:44:19","slug":"detainee-miguel-murphy","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/product\/detainee-miguel-murphy\/","title":{"rendered":"<em>Detainee<\/em>, Miguel Murphy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The dark eroticism that inhabits Miguel Murphy\u2019s <em>Detainee<\/em> becomes eerily familiar as each startling poem explores the urges, the instincts, and the passions that bare their teeth\u2014\u201dwhat is love without arrows?\u201d Human nature\u2019s private hues are visceral and violent, sensual and predatory, and Murphy\u2019s provocative verse dares to imagine them undisguised, as if to tell us, \u201cYou don\u2019t even know\/ the beast who you are.\u201d<br \/>\n\u2014Rigoberto Gonz\u00e1lez<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>In <em>Detainee<\/em>, the body is a deeply unsafe space. Like Sade, Murphy teases out the theater, politics, pain, and, yes, erotics of cruelty, forcing us to recognize that love, at root, is a dirty game, where shame, perversion, and disgust are not vices to be hidden but overcome. In <em>Detainee<\/em>, our private desires mirror the anxieties of our public world: war, immigration, torture, and political persecution seep into our imagination of the human body, turning us all\u2014figuratively and sometimes even literally\u2014into brutal (and brutalized) animals. And yet it is only through such brutality, Murphy\u2019s poems suggest, that personal freedom can become a reality, in that pain and sexual desire intertwine to change our definition of the self, reexamining the role of love in a world where \u201c[t]he body wants to\/ be changed, scoured, stripped, turned in-\/side out with pleasure.\u201d We believe that pain must have limits, but Murphy shows us that, when it comes to desire, and our need to be finally ourselves, there is none.<br \/>\n\u2014Paisley Rekdal<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019re leather first. We\u2019re blood. The hot\/stars &amp; seas don\u2019t care\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 <a class=\"twitter-share-button\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/share\" data-size=\"large\" data-text=\"\u201cWe\u2019re leather first. We\u2019re blood. The hot\/stars &amp;amp; seas don\u2019t care\u201d\" data-url=\"http:\/\/bit.ly\/2szbRbv\" data-via=\"BarrowStreetInc\" data-show-count=\"false\">Tweet<\/a><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><br \/>\n\u201cThese are the nights\/the blood inside you matters.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 <a class=\"twitter-share-button\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/share\" data-size=\"large\" data-text=\"\u201cThese are the nights\/the blood inside you matters.\u201d\" data-url=\"http:\/\/bit.ly\/2szbRbv\" data-via=\"BarrowStreetInc\" data-show-count=\"false\">Tweet<\/a><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p><code><\/code><br \/>\n<strong>Detainee<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>You haven\u2019t yet been held<\/p>\n<p>your nose forced down<br \/>\nlike the dog that couldn\u2019t<br \/>\nhold it. The prisoner<br \/>\nforced into his own<\/p>\n<p>foul light\u2014<br \/>\nTo eat of it, to taste<\/p>\n<p>bitterness itself\u2014perhaps began with the dashed<br \/>\nskull of the first child fallen<br \/>\naccidentally from the breast,<\/p>\n<p>to eat of its brains, the pudding<br \/>\nof its eyes, of even<br \/>\nits shit, when nothing\u2019s left.<\/p>\n<p>The madness of grief when all you have is<br \/>\nthe mess of the body.<br \/>\n<em>How it burned, how it hurt,<\/em><\/p>\n<p>the dark horn of it. The sacrilege<br \/>\nof the bowels pure. Like this crime<br \/>\nthe young soldier is forcing<\/p>\n<p>into the red dirt\u2014and the prisoner,<br \/>\nwe force him to eat it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Applicable bookseller\/retail discount on bulk orders of 10+ copies automatically applied at checkout.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1386,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[20],"product_tag":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1385","1":"product","2":"type-product","3":"status-publish","4":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"product_cat-poetry","8":"first","9":"instock","10":"shipping-taxable","11":"purchasable","12":"product-type-simple"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product\/1385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/product"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1385"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"product_brand","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_brand?post=1385"},{"taxonomy":"product_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_cat?post=1385"},{"taxonomy":"product_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_tag?post=1385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}